Theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli, reflecting on his own discipline, has said some valuable things. For example, he critiques the continuing efforts to overturn principles of physics, pointing out that they misrepresent the intentions of, say, Thomas Kuhn (1922–1996) and Karl Popper (1902–1994).

But recently he fell into an all-too-common trap for creative thinkers. He offered an opinion on a subject outside his discipline. At thinkmag Noema, he tells us, “There is no hard problem of consciousness.”

What? All those puzzled students of the human mind — thousands of them — are just wasting their time?

To defend his view, he trots out Darwin’s evolution theory:

Many felt confounded or degraded by the idea of sharing a family tree with donkeys. The cultural history of modernity is dotted by similar ideological rearguard battles, wherein old worldviews fight in retreat against novel knowledge to save some concept held dear. Amid the current cultural backlash against progressive ideas, today’s debate on consciousness reflects our human fears of belonging to the same family as inanimate matter and losing our dear, transcendent souls.

“There Is No ‘Hard Problem Of Consciousness,’” May 7, 2026

He then goes after New York University’s David Chalmers, who coined the term “Hard Problem” and those who pursue it:

But this curious claim has been enthusiastically embraced by crowds of thinkers, commentators and writers across many fields and worldviews, who have all jumped on the bandwagon of the “hard problem.” This widespread embrace is nourished by a strenuous resistance to an idea anticipated centuries ago by the philosopher Baruch Spinoza: that our soul could be a phenomenon of the same basic nature as any other phenomenon in nature. ‘Hard Problem’

Actually, many neuroscientists and philosophers vexed by the Hard Problem would be happy to make it go away just by accepting that consciousness is the same sort of thing as a flea, a cloud, or a sofa. But they know better.

Image Credit: Jorm Sangsorn - Adobe Stock

Rovelli unwittingly helps us understand why:

The mind is the behavior of the brain, properly described in a high-level language. Neither my own experience of myself nor an external experience of me is primary: They are two distinct perspectives on the same events. ‘Hard Problem’

Perspective? What is Rovelli talking about? One wants to ask him a question similar to the one that the Lord asks Adam in the Book of Genesis, “Who told you that you were naked?” (Gen 3:11)

Similarly, who told Rovelli that there is (or isn’t) an abstraction called consciousness, one that he understands and the tree in the back yard doesn’t?

The inner and outer perspectives on a person that he refers to are consciousness — and they are not material at all. They are generated in part by living material senses, of course. In part, our perspectives are generated by abstract processes as well, and they are not easy to study empirically. But the perspectives cannot be weighed or measured or otherwise treated as if they were matter. Indeed, if hardline materialism were a useful approach, we would have made more progress by now.

Rovelli nonetheless ends with a flourish:

Earth is not metaphysically different from the heavens, living beings are not metaphysically different from inanimate matter, humans are not metaphysically different from other animals. The soul is not metaphysically different from the body. We are all parts of nature, like anything else in this sweet world. ‘Hard Problem’

The trouble is…

Give this declamation a moment’s thought. What does “metaphysically” mean? Suppose we take it out of the sentences above. We get:

Earth is not different from the heavens, living beings are not different from inanimate matter, humans are not different from other animals. The soul is not different from the body. We are all parts of nature, like anything else in this sweet world.

Now let’s look at each of the assertions:

● Earth is not different from the heavens? (Who knows?)

● Living beings are not different from inanimate matter? (Yes, they fundamentally are.)

● Humans are not different from other animals. (Yes we are. We can think in ways they can’t.)

● The soul is not different from the body. (Yes it is. On Rovelli’s reckoning, the soul does not exist as a separate thing from the body. That makes it different from the body, which does exist, even if we accepted his perspective.)

It’s not clear what the word “metaphysically” is doing in Rovelli’s closing declamation above. In what sense does it describe anything? This sort of thing is one of the reasons why few people who study consciousness would agree that there is no Hard Problem, whatever resolution they favor.

Prominent neuroscientist Anil Seth and philosopher of mind Tim Bayne recently summed up the state of the discipline as follows:

Good theories guide empirical research, allowing us to interpret data, develop new experimental techniques and expand our capacity to manipulate the phenomenon of interest. Indeed, it is only when couched in terms of a theory that empirical discoveries can ultimately deliver a satisfying understanding of a phenomenon. However, in the case of consciousness, it is unclear how current theories relate to each other, or whether they can be empirically distinguished.

Seth, A.K., & Bayne, T. (2021). “Theories of consciousness, Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 23, 439 – 452.”

After all these years, consciousness is still a Hard Problem, whether we want to call it that or not. And we don’t have a particular reason to expect the sort of eliminative materialism that Rovelli recommends, which has been no help in the past, to be any more so in the future.

But I, for one, look forward to reading more of Rovelli’s lay-directed articles on theoretical physics.